This autumn, London gallerist, Niccolo Sprovieri revisits the radical, early 20th century theoretical departure spelled out by Kasimir Malevich in his book, ‘The Non-Objective World’, not through his original Black Square paintings, but through related works by the important living conceptual artists, Art & Language (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) and Ilya Kabakov. As

Honor Fraser Gallery is pleased to announce Annie Lapin: Watchers and Winks, on view November 5 through December 16, 2016. A reception will be held at the gallery on November 5 from 6–8pm.

Watchers and Winks is Annie Lapin's third exhibition with Honor Fraser Gallery. Though still connected to her prior investigations into landscape, perception and cognition, and the materials of painting, Lapin's new paintings constitute a significant departure in her method of working and reworking each canvas. Her compositional deliberations coalesce into a series of evocative, otherworldly spaces that involve a multifaceted combination of poured stains, digital deconstruction and augmentation, and a broad range of other techniques. Incorporating both chance effects and purposeful marks, Lapin's resulting environments record her concerted efforts to picture the processes of perception and cognition.

To create the initial frameworks of her new paintings, Lapin pours charcoal-infused washes onto each canvas, letting them spill and pool into organic forms. She then works amongst the pours' accidental outlines, reentering them to build up arrangements of distinct shapes and planes. These varied passages include an array of textures, from raw canvas, velvety brushstrokes, and silkscreen overlays to powdered pigments, gold leaf, and wooly fibers. Their multiplicity stems, in part, from Lapin's turn to Photoshop as a tool to imagine hundreds of potential permutations for each composition before determining its final state. Though she translates her painterly effects back onto the canvas using traditional, analog techniques, many bare the trace of their digital origins. In Maneuvers in Space and Concrete and Sky Relieves the Tension of an Expanse where Figure Futures Impinge on an Emergent Landspace, a rich, evenly diffused spray of ultramarine blue recalls Photoshop's airbrush function; part of a pale pink field seems wiped away by Photoshop's Eraser Tool; and painted gradients and trompe l'oeil drop-shadows speak in the same cut-and-paste language of design software. Lapin moves willfully between an aura of hyper-real digital space and a grounded, earthly physicality in an effort to destabilize viewers, leaving them to hover in a state of irresolution as to what they are witnessing.

Though the collage-like facets in Lapin's new paintings seem to drift amongst each other, often floating in an atmospheric ether, they also form coherent units with a distinct sense of foreground and background. One can imagine entering these works physically, delving into their unlikely worlds to touch their textures and inhabit their architectures. These spaces are conceived as manifestations of how the mind operates in the realm of dreams, where it adheres to a logic unbound by reality: Synaptic firings in the mind lead to images that make little sense once awake, yet while immersed in dreams, we believe wholeheartedly in their strange, flowing reasoning. Lapin repeats visual cues from one canvas to the next—identical slivers of sky, the dappled streak of a paint roller, galaxies and forested views—offering connective tissues between these worlds, while also acknowledging the tenuousness with which each element finds meaning in any one painting.

Vague bodily figures populate Lapin's abstracted spaces, giving each a sense of action, reaction, and movement. The charcoal pours in Watchers and Winks take on the unmistakable guise of human profiles, and outlines of legs appear on the shores of a peach- toned seascape. An imprint in the upper right—a silkscreened image of Lapin's face, pressed to distortion—inserts a record of the artist's own body. These and other morphing objects function like characters and props on a bizarre stage set—a performative setting that A Play dramatizes with its roughly outlined curtain and play of spotlights and shadows.

Lapin's works ultimately offer a logic that remains abstract, arcane, and just out of reach. Though she has rendered her painted worlds with careful precision, they nevertheless exude a palpable sense of mystery and possibility, as well as a reminder to be prepared, at any moment, for the ground to shift beneath our feet.

Annie Lapin was born in Washington, D.C. and lives in Los Angeles. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 2001; a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004; and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007. One-person exhibitions of Lapin's work have been presented at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC (2013); Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA (2012); Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA (2009); and Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO (2008). Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors' Private Collections, Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT (2016); Sincerely Yours, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2015); The Go-Between, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy (2014); Chasm of the Supernova, Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, CA (2012); La Californie, The Museum of Public Fiction, Los Angeles, CA (2011); Baker's Dozen III, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2011); Unfinished Paintings, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA (2011); and NewNow, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS (2009). Lapin was the recipient of the Falk Visiting Artist Reward from the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC in 2013.

Galerie Max Hetzler is delighted to announce Grids: Numbers and Trees III, and Palm Trees II, the gallery’s first exhibition with Charles Gaines.

Los Angeles - based artist Charles Gaines has engaged in conceptual art for four decades. Critical thinking is central to his practice that includes photographs and drawings plotted out on grids. His work is informed by various sources, from John Cage, Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings, German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, to the esoteric philosophy of Tantric Buddhism, Marxism, semiotics and post-colonial theories.

Gaines has found systematic ways of “generating imagery”, working in series and plotting numbers on grids, thus questioning representation. His approach is a formal way of breaking down images into serial patterns. Gaines is interested in the gap that emerges between the systems and the charted subjects by analogy on the one hand and with rational thoughts of perception.

The exhibition features two series of works. Numbers and Trees started in 1985, more than ten years after the Walnut Tree Orchard series (1975-2014) where Charles Gaines first studied the tree as a subject. Gaines had initially painted trees on acrylic sheets but was not satisfied with the result as he wanted to find a way to take the ego out of the painting. Hence his aim at looking for a systematic means of “shaping a form”, at times layering the sheets over black-and-white landscape pictures. The trees are a combination of differently painted squares that are numbered according to their location on the sheet. For the Central Park series, Gaines started by photographing trees at this specific location. The silhouette of the tree is plotted on a grid that has been printed on a Plexiglas sheet layered over the black and white landscape pictures. The branches are delimited through the use of intensely coloured squares and numbers are not visible from afar. Only a closer look reveals the different digits and encourages the viewer to participate and reflect upon the representational system.
The series successively plots the shape of trees of different hue on one another, moving further away from a singular tree and closer to a tree as a generic type.

The Palm Trees series started in 2015. As with Number and Trees, the shape of a tree is plotted in numbers on a grid, further exploring the serialization of a set of analogous images. The series
consists of four ink of paper drawings based on photographs of palm trees, each unique.

Once again, the tree appears to be almost a generic subject for a number of artists. From Cezanne and Mondrian to recent paintings by Albert Oehlen or the recurrent ones in Ai Weiwei’s practice.